Mash-Up of Schubert and Synagogue Tradition

Judith Berkson’s New Opera, ‘The Vienna Rite’

Judith Berkson, at the IBeam music studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn, has composed the chamber opera “The Vienna Rite.”Credit
Philip Greenberg for The New York Times

More by accident than by design, Judith Berkson has followed a circuitous and genre-hopping musical path. Her introduction to the art form was through her father, a cantor in a conservative synagogue in Chicago who taught her Jewish sacred music. As a high school student, she got interested in opera and art song, and she earned a degree in voice from the New England Conservatory, in Boston, where she also studied composition and piano.

When she arrived in New York in 2001, though, most of her friends were jazz performers, who persuaded her to sing or play keyboards for their gigs and recordings. She kept her hand in the classical music world by performing with new-music groups like the Wet Ink Ensemble, and she had a day job as an assistant cantor and Hebrew schoolteacher in Old Westbury, N.Y. Mostly she developed a graceful, laid-back style as a jazz singer and pianist that is evident on “Oylam,” her quirky 2010 CD (ECM), on which her interests collide: cabaret standards are juxtaposed with a Yiddish song, one of her own cantorial pieces and a jazzy take on a song from Schubert’s “Winterreise.”

Ms. Berkson’s latest project — “The Vienna Rite,” a chamber opera that will have its premiere at Roulette on Friday and Saturday — mashes up and amplifies those interests even further. The work’s hero is Salomon Sulzer, a 19th-century Viennese cantor and composer whose settings of Hebrew prayers are still used in synagogues, and the plot is, basically, Sulzer’s creation of the modern synagogue service in 1828. “We’re looking at a specific window in which Sulzer is putting together the Vienna rite,” Ms. Berkson, a soft-spoken 35-year-old, explained in an interview last week in the back room at Barbès, a Park Slope, Brooklyn, club where she often performs. “We’re looking in on his creative process, so we see him working with his friend and teacher, Ignaz von Seyfried, who was a friend of Beethoven’s, and Joseph Drechsler, who helped him and contributed pieces. We see his boys’ choir bringing the music to life. And Schubert is always in the mix.”

Schubert? The composer whose output includes, along with hundreds of thoroughly secular art songs, six complete Masses and a great deal of Latin church music?

As it turns out, Sulzer had an alternative musical life, as a vocal recitalist with what contemporaries described as a rich baritone, and he was particularly devoted to Schubert. The two became friends, and at some point Sulzer persuaded Schubert to compose a choral setting of Psalm 92, in Hebrew, for “Shir Zion” (“Song of Zion”), an expansive compilation Sulzer was preparing but that he did not publish until 1840.

No correspondence between Schubert and Sulzer survives. But given the expertise with which Schubert set the Hebrew text, it seems likely that Sulzer transliterated it for him and perhaps coached him on the proper accenting.

“I really struggled with trying to find the right way to include him,” Ms. Berkson says of Schubert’s place in her chamber opera. “I thought, ‘Do I have somebody dressed up as Schubert?’ I considered that, but in the end I thought his spirit would be in there, through his music. Without giving too much away, he is involved in the story, with his music and his presence, as a collaborator.”

Curiously, Ms. Berkson quotes little of Sulzer’s own music; as of last week, in fact, she had ruled out using any. Instead she had composed her own sacred settings, which the Sulzer character sings. But by last Friday, she had changed her mind.

“I ended up placing a Sulzer melody into a scene which actually ties together a narrative moment well,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Ms. Berkson began thinking about the relationship between Sulzer and Schubert after a conversation with David Harrington, the first violinist of the Kronos Quartet. Ms. Berkson had arranged some cantorial music for Kronos and was planning to sing with that ensemble at the Greenwich Village club Le Poisson Rouge in 2010. Mr. Harrington, who had heard Ms. Berkson perform Schubert’s “Raven,” suggested that she arrange both that piece and Psalm 92 for their performance.

“I have conversations all the time with many composers and musicians,” Mr. Harrington said in an e-mail from Budapest, where Kronos was touring. “So it is frequently impossible to know where ideas originate. But somehow Judith and I were speaking about Schubert and Solomon Sulzer — the little opened window those two men created in a very restrictive society, a window that, if Schubert could have lived, might have lead to even more contact between differing traditions. Somehow this idea, which I think is very potent, has led Judith to thoroughly study Solomon Sulzer’s life and feature him in her new opera.”

The 75-minute opera is scored for three soloists, who portray Sulzer, Seyfried and Drechsler, and a quartet of choristers (of which Ms. Berkson will be one), accompanied by three organists and three percussionists, including members of the ensemble Yarn/Wire and Brian Chase, the drummer from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

The libretto, Ms. Berkson said, is essentially nonnarrative, drawn mostly from the liturgy, found texts and Sulzer’s memoirs. The opera turns into a service halfway through.

“I wanted to bring the aura of what it’s like to be in a synagogue,” she added. “I grew up in that world, and it’s very special when the services are going on, and there’s a choir. I really wanted to capture that feeling of spirituality, of holiness. And it puts you into Sulzer’s head, following him through this process.”

Correction: November 6, 2012

Because of an editing error, an article on Friday about the composer and performer Judith Berkson misidentified the state where she once worked as an assistant cantor and Hebrew schoolteacher in the town of Old Westbury. It is New York, not Connecticut.

A version of this article appears in print on November 2, 2012, on page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: Mash-Up of Schubert and Synagogue Tradition. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe